Archive for September, 2009
Evil flower-monsters
Tuesday, September 29th, 2009
I’ve been brainstorming today for a contest offered up by one of my favorite blogs, “A Journey Round My Skull.” The challenge is to come up with a bookplate based on themes relating to an obscure German publication from the 1920’s, “Der Orchideengarten.” You can read all about the contest and see some covers from the magazine here.
Thus, monstrous doodles. If my entomologist sister is reading this, please forgive whatever anatomical inadequacies you may find in the ant below. It was poorly researched. (It was not researched.)
Fortunately, I have until the 14th to come up with something.
a quick one
Tuesday, September 29th, 2009
A small painting for a friend. Possibly inspired by my weekend trip to the Berlin aquarium. (Photos and videos to follow!)
static electricity
Tuesday, September 22nd, 2009
Happy autumnal equinox, everyone!
Though it was a beautiful day here with clear blue skies, something compelled me to start thinking about lightning. Maybe it was this video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_X_7YRVGvtA
I look at it from time to time because it’s clearly spectacular. I thought I’d give a Tucson monsoon scene a go myself, armed only with a black Prismacolor approximately 4.5 cm long. (To be fair, it was more like 5.5 cm before I started.) If the modeling looks a bit weird to you, that is because it was all my feeble brain could figure out without any visual assistance.
I didn’t even get into worrying about rain. Rain would have overloaded my processor. .
I was having trouble figuring out how exactly a night scene brightly lit by lightning would look. Since it only lasts a fraction of a second, I’ve never had the chance to note any details. I did find one image of lightning actually illuminating something other than the sky (via Google image search):
This photograph makes me feel kind of sorry for that tree.
New picture
Friday, September 11th, 2009
I haven’t posted much lately because I’ve been working on this drawing:
I wanted to experiment with text in the picture, so I used the ‘ol “Lorem ipsum…”
I imagine this would go with the last picture, where the girl in red is chasing the other character through the market. I figure she must live in the house; maybe she caught him sneaking around and he took off running? I wish I had more of a story than that.
Here’s a zoom—because so much detail gets lost on the computer screen:
The Chinese street market
Thursday, September 3rd, 2009
At long last, I have finished my latest painting. I reinvented it about five times over the last few days, scanning and copying and adding bits of paper collage and copying and repainting… until I finally liked the color and composition. It’s also much more detailed than the previous paintings I’ve made, because it’s much bigger, roughly A3-size.
There are a few things about it that still bug me. For example, the girl in the foreground is just too high on the page. For some reason I imagined that she is coming down some steps into this street market, but I realize now that there’s no way anyone would know that; it just looks odd. It’s a bit late to fix it, but maybe I’ll try to move her down digitally, or find a way to show her feet.
Here’s a detail:
Here’s the original sketch… it’s a little bit different…
